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Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Ethiopia Refuses to Cooperate With World-Bank-Funding Probe

Ethiopia’s government said it won’t
cooperate with a probe into whether the World Bank violated its
own policies by funding a program in which thousands of people
were allegedly relocated to make way for agriculture investors.
Ethnic Anuak people in Ethiopia’s southwestern Gambella
region and rights groups including Human Rights Watch last year
accused the Washington-based lender of funding a program
overseen by soldiers to forcibly resettle 45,000 households. The
Inspection Panel of the World Bank, an independent complaints
mechanism, began an investigation in October into the
allegations, which donors and the government have denied.
“We are not going to cooperate with the Inspection
Panel,” Getachew Reda, a spokesman for Prime Minister
Hailemariam Desalegn, said in a phone interview on May 22. “To
an extent that there’s a need for cooperation, it’s not going to
be with the Inspection Panel, but with the World Bank”
Ethiopia, Africa’s most-populous nation after Nigeria, has
made 3.3 million hectares (8.2 million acres) of land available
to agriculture companies. Investors include Karuturi Global Ltd. (KARG)
of India, the world’s largest rose grower, and companies owned
by Saudi billionaire Mohamed al-Amoudi.
There is a “plausible link” between the Promoting Basic
Services program, partly funded by the bank to pay the salaries
of local government workers, and a resettlement process also
known as villagization in Gambella, the panel said in a Nov. 19
report obtained by Bloomberg News. The World Bank confirmed the
authenticity of the report.

‘Potential Non-Compliance’

The concurrent implementation of PBS and the resettlement
program may raise issues of “potential serious non-compliance
with bank policy,” according to the report.
“From a development perspective, the two programs depend
on each other, and may mutually influence the results of the
other,” the panel said. Human Rights Watch, based in New York, made similar
allegations about the resettlement program in a January 2012
report. Those findings and the Inspection Panel process are part
of a “propaganda campaign being waged against the government,”
Getachew said by phone from the capital, Addis Ababa. “It’s not
a World Bank inspection panel, it’s a panel that likes to impose
its mostly fictitious findings on the decision-making process of
the World Bank.”
About 35,000 households voluntarily moved over the past
three years in Gambella and now have better access to public
services and are growing more food, State Minister of Federal
Affairs Omod Obang Olum said in a May 15 interview.

‘Unprecedented’

The complaint to the panel was made on behalf of 26 Anuaks
now living in South Sudan and Kenya. Refusal to cooperate with
the panel by a World Bank member state is “unprecedented,”
said David Pred, a managing associate at Inclusive Development
International, or IDI, a California-based human-rights group
that assisted with the complaint.
“I don’t see how the bank could justifiably continue
supporting Ethiopia if the government simply rejects outright
any semblance of accountability,” he said in an e-mailed
response to questions.
The complaints should be investigated further “as they
pertain to the bank’s application of its policies and
procedures,” the panel said. The probe should not look at
allegations of “specific human rights abuses” or the
“underlying purposes” of the resettlement program, it said.

Donor Aid

Donors provided $3.56 billion of aid to Ethiopia in 2011,
which was 11.3 percent of gross national income, according to
the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The World Bank said that while officials on PBS-funded
salaries may have “responsibilities related” to resettlement,
this doesn’t mean the two programs were “directly linked,”
according to the panel.
There was no evidence of “forced relocations or systematic
human-rights abuses,” according to reports by two fact-finding
missions in 2011 and 2012 by donors including the U.K. and U.S.
aid agencies. “Half of the people interviewed said they didn’t
want to move” and some said public services hadn’t been
provided in new sites, the 2012 report found.
PBS “does not build upon villagization, it is not
synchronized with villagization, and does not require
villagization to achieve its objectives,” the World Bank’s
management said in response to the complaint. “Furthermore the
bank does not finance” villagization.

Election Violence

PBS began in 2006 after donors stopped “direct budget
support” to the federal government because of violence
following a disputed 2005 election. The program provides block
grants to regional governments that are mainly spent on
education, health, agriculture, water and road workers.
A postponed March 19 discussion of PBS by the bank’s board
has yet to be rescheduled, Guang Chen, the bank’s Ethiopia
director, said in an e-mailed response to questions. “Staff are
not authorized to comment prior to the board discussion,” he
said.
Since 2006, PBS has cost donors and the government $13
billion, the panel said. The ongoing phase is funded by the
government, the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the
European Union, the U.K., Austria and Italy.
The panel also can’t comment at this stage, operations
analyst Dilya Zoirova said in an e-mailed response to questions.
http://www.bloomberg.com/